This is the official blog about the development of OctoMY™, the robot platform for you!

2016-09-02

How to get going with Vulkan & NVIDIA on Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04

First, I found that there really was no support for Vulkan in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, or at least without a lot of custom configurations that I would like to avoid. So I decided to upgrade my system to Ubuntu 16.04.

Getting started with Vulkan in Ubuntu with nVidia.

Next I tried to find my way by following a lot of different tutorials and advice. Nothing seemed to work for me, and getting Vulkan on my laptop was looking impossible until I decided to follow this simple advice. I decided to shamelessly steal his advice and add my own extra observations. So here are the steps:

Open this page on your tablet/phone

Hit <CTRL> + <F1> to go to a text-only terminal

Log inn using your normal username and password

Get rid of the old nvida drivers, libraries, configurations and other gunk (this step is optional, but if you tried some stuff before getting here it can be well worth it starting fresh): # sudo apt-get remove --purge nvidia*

At this point you may reboot and try the vulkaninfo command from terminal to see what vulkan stuff is found in your system.

TIP: If you have a dual gpu setup which is common nowadays, your secondary inferior (usually Intel) GPU might get in the way of your Vulkan setup and this page shows you how to disable it.

Now it's time to look at and run some code. The official "wrangler lib" and SDK for Vulkan is called "LunarG" and it is not in the Ubuntu repos. It contains libraries, tools and example code for you to play with. You have to download it and unpack/build/install it the old fashioned way: